A blog of Bridge Environment, updated weekly on Thursdays, travel permitting.
Bridge Environment seeks to catalyze a cultural shift in how our society addresses environmental issues. We provide relevant and unbiased advice to any interested party, and also work to educate scientists, policy makers, and the public on how to have a more informative dialog over environmental issues.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

A lesson in environmental policy from a small island fishery

I was extremely fortunate
early on in my career. I guess I can be credited with bucking my educational
system and insisting on doing research that had application to real-world
environmental issues. Upon choosing this path, I recall advice from faculty that
included such colorful phrases as “no funding,” “unemployable,” and “throwing
your career away.” Thankfully, I was even more stubborn back then than I am now
and so I did it anyway.

It wasn’t an
easy path. Despite a new Ph.D. from Cornell University, a world powerhouse in
ecology, and a publication in Ecology,
the top ecological journal in the world, my job search was brutal. Maybe those
faculty were right after all! I applied for about 60 positions, and only one of
them resulted in any follow up. Fortunately, it was a great opportunity.

Shortly after
finishing up my dissertation, I moved to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, to do
research with Callum
Roberts, a leader in applied marine environmental research. I came in to
help with a project to rezone a marine park on St. Lucia. Callum left in my
first year to return to his native England, and I was chosen to replace him as
a professor at the University of the Virgin Islands. Not bad for a 27 year old!
My job included advisory responsibilities to the government on environmental
issues. Through those responsibilities, I got to know the fishing community.

Near the end of
my three year stint on the island, a major issue resurfaced. The Caribbean
Fisheries Management Council, which helps to set fishing policy for the waters
around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, wanted a no-fishing zone as a
way of helping to protect coral and coral reef ecosystems. Such closures have
many names, from marine protected areas to marine reserves to, most recently,
marine spatial planning. The Council’s scientific advisory panel had their
heart set on an area that was south of St. John (a close neighbor to St. Thomas
and home to the Virgin Islands National
Park, which covers a large section of the island due to the foresight and
generosity of the Rockefeller family). The proposed area was close to, but not
actually bordering, the waters of the British Virgin Islands (part of the same
island chain but a British territory with independent environmental
management).

The fishermen of
St. Thomas and St. John were not pleased. These were productive fishing grounds
and, more importantly, closing them would also isolate a further area between the
proposed closure and the British Virgin Islands border. Traveling a fair
distance to that remote corner would not have been worthwhile. The fishing
community had responded to the threat of the closed area by stalling. Their
primary technique was to propose the closure of a small area bordering the
British Virgin Islands, suggesting that authorities on the other side of the
border could reciprocate and, together, the two areas would be suitable. The
likelihood of this sort of international cooperation was slim, and so the
fishermen’s proposal slowed progress.

When the issue resurfaced,
I had an opportunity to meet with the local fisheries advisory board, made up
mostly of fishermen. I was invited to present my research on the design of
fisheries closures because I was a world expert in the subject. Instead of preaching,
though, I talked to the fishermen and women in attendance, asking them about
the quality of fishing, how it had changed over the years, and what they wanted
out of their fisheries in the future. What was supposed to be a half-hour
scientific presentation turned into a three hour heart-to-heart on fisheries
management. I encouraged the fishing community to embrace the change suggested
by the Council, but to use the process to create management measures that would
serve their purposes instead of thwarting them. Over subsequent weeks, leaders
of the fishing community floated several proposals by me, eventually coming up
with one that, in my expert opinion, matched the conservation value of the
Council’s proposed area.

The fishermen’s
proposal was an interesting one. Due to earlier good work by some responsible
fishermen and two marine biologist friends of mine, Jim Beets and Alan Friedlander,
the Council had identified a spawning aggregation site for red hind, a
medium-sized member of the Serranid (grouper) family. From 1990, the Council
closed the Red Hind Bank during spawning season. You see, some of the tastiest
and most sought-after fish in tropical waters gather together in large numbers once
or more per year to reproduce. When discovered, these large aggregations of
prized fish can be subject to intense fishing pressure, which can deplete that
species across a broad area. For this reason, protecting spawning aggregations
is generally a good idea.

But the seasonal
closure complicated fishing efforts in that area during the open season. One of
the preferred methods of fishing in the tropics is the use of fish traps, cages
with funnels that fish swim into but are less likely to swim out of. Traps are
typically strung together on lines, and moving a line of traps is an
undertaking. Fishermen prefer to pull up traps, empty them, and return them immediately
to continue fishing. Because of the productivity of the Red Hind Bank even
outside of spawning season, fishermen still brought traps in, but either had to
leave them there (illegally) or move them back and forth. When they proposed a
year-round closure of the area, it fit with the mandate to protect corals and
coral reef ecosystems. With the support of the fishing community and the
scientific stamp of approval by a world expert in marine protected area design,
the fishermen’s proposal sailed through the Council process. In 1999, the Red
Hind Bank Marine Conservation District was created and closed year-round the
area around the spawning aggregation.

On my visit to St.
Thomas last week, I heard welcome news about the closure. Red hind were
extremely plentiful in the catches of St. Thomas fishermen, and it was common
to catch very large individuals, larger than fishermen used to think was
possible. The fishermen I spoke to continue to support the closure and seem
more open to protection of other spawning aggregations, more of which have now
been identified in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Efforts to create fishery closures
do not always go this smoothly or result in such vivid benefits. However, they often
have the capacity for success if we use science more effectively and inspire
fishing communities to develop management measures that meet their objectives while
satisfying broader sustainability and conservation mandates. We did that in
creating the Red Hind Bank Marine Conservation District, and both fish and
fishermen are better off as a result.